Spice Girls

Essential Albums

  • Spiceworld
    Spiceworld
    Spiceworld

    How do you follow an album like Spice? The Spice Girls’ 1996 debut made them a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, storming to No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic, spawning a record-breaking four UK No. 1 singles and being nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. Producing a worthy follow-up was always going to be an intimidating prospect—one further complicated by the small detail that much of it would be written and recorded between takes on the six-week shoot of the group’s first feature film (also named Spice World). Could they bottle lightning twice? “We spent about 18 months, on and off, writing Spice with them,” Andy Watkins of the production duo Absolute tells Apple Music. “With Spiceworld, we had about six days. They'd come still in their movie costumes, so one day Geri [Halliwell] turned up in army fatigues. Then again, she'd always turn up wearing mad things: a ski in the middle of summer, or something bizarre from a charity shop. She'd arrive with reams of lyric ideas, with knob doodles all over them.” At one point, their makeshift recording studio (housed in an articulated van on set) was mobbed by fans. “Security had left for the day and it turned into a bit of a riot,” says Watkins' partner Paul Wilson. “Mel B recorded the opening verse to 'Too Much' with fans rocking the van back and forth and police horses circling.” This sense of chaos was best harnessed on the shouty, samba-inflected lead single, “Spice Up Your Life”, the sound of a carnival in the Topshop changing rooms. Elsewhere on the album, “Stop” is an infectious Motown pastiche (written as a directive to their soon-to-be-chopped manager, Simon Fuller) and “Never Give Up on the Good Times” is an assured slice of '70s disco. The influence of a year spent trotting the globe in platform boots could be felt on “Viva Forever”, a wistful flamenco-style ballad about holiday romances. The album's final single, it featured rich harmonies from the two Melanies and gained added poignancy in the wake of Geri's departure from the group, spelling the end of their imperial phase. If Spice acted as a manifesto for world domination, then consider Spiceworld the group's victory parade. Boasting broader influences and bigger hooks, their message was clear: This is the Spice Girls' world and we were just blessed to be living in it. As Watkins puts it, “There was an understanding that what we were doing meant something to a lot of people.”

  • Spice
    Spice
    Spice

    Opening with the stomp of a platform boot and an unrestrained cackle, Spice launched the Spice Girls onto an unsuspecting world with the kind of unbridled, unpolished joie de vivre that would become their calling card. The year was 1996 and the band’s domestic musical landscape predominantly featured boys with guitars (Oasis, Blur) or boys with curtains (Take That, Boyzone)—and Scary, Baby, Sporty, Ginger and Posh suggested a radical third way, demolishing the outdated edict that girl bands don’t work with the flick of a V-sign. They were loud, bratty and unapologetically feminine; as comfortable singing about mother/daughter conflicts as slagging off “losers on the dance floor”. Having originally answered an ad in (entertainment industry newspaper) The Stage looking for “streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated” women for an “all-female pop act”, Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Melanie Chisholm, Geri Halliwell and Victoria Adams soon discovered that their ambitions dwarfed those of their management and they absconded with their demos. By the time they signed with music mogul Simon Fuller, most of their debut was written (they claimed co-writing credits on all 10 tracks). They’d also decided to lean into their disparate personas, creating the impression of a roving party to which everyone was invited. While other girl bands had a lead singer, this was a democracy in which writing credits and vocals were split five ways, and where the ruling ethos was fun, fun and more fun. First track and lead single “Wannabe” is as much a mission statement as a song—assuring the listener via a riot of hooks that, while boyfriends are replaceable, friendship never ends. From there, the album barrels through Europop, R&B and disco, never quite lifting its foot off the accelerator. By its close, listeners were left in no doubt that they had witnessed the birth of a new moment in pop—one with the power to shift astonishing quantities of albums, lollipops and platforms, and even launch a new brand of feminism. Girl power had arrived and a new wave of female-centric pop would follow—but none would be quite as charmingly chaotic.

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About Spice Girls

When five young women answered a theatrical magazine ad in the summer of 1993 looking for "lively girls" to form a musical group, they had no idea they would be changing the face of music for decades to come. In the age of boy bands, Emma Bunton (Baby Spice), Geri Halliwell (Ginger Spice), Melanie Brown (Scary Spice), Melanie Chisholm (Sporty Spice) and Victoria Beckham née Adams (Posh Spice) showed what girl power could do. Their 1996 sing-along hit, “Wannabe”, hit number one in the UK, and by the end of the year, it repeated that feat in 21 other countries. Their debut album, Spice, came out later that year, delivering the friends-first anthem “Say You’ll Be There” and the romantic “2-Become-1”. They continued their chart-topping success with their second album, Spiceworld, which served as a soundtrack to the gloriously over-the-top film of the same name. The 1997 album, colored with tinges of ‘60s pop, ‘70s disco and ‘80s-style samba and filled with empowering songs about sisterhood and self-respect inspired a new generation of women pop stars, like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. But touring and life as tabloid fodder took their toll and the group began to splinter not long after the release of their R&B-fueled third album, Forever (2000). They announced a hiatus in February of 2001, but it didn’t stick. The Spice Girls reunited for a tour in 2007, the London Summer Olympics in 2012, and a string of concerts since (without former member Posh). Whether on stage or on the radio, the Spice Girls continue to inspire legions of women to step out of the background and kick it up.

ORIGIN
London, England
FORMED
1994
GENRE
Pop

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